Why do Republicans have so little dignity?
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is considered one of the great political novels of the last century, but it is also very puzzling. Why does Rubashov, the loyal old Bolshevik, confess to capital crimes he did not commit? He is not tortured; he knows (as do his interrogators) that the charges are absurd.
Koestler, a disillusioned ex-communist, employs Rubashov as a metaphor for the moral bankruptcy that totalitarian ideologies deliberately inculcate in their followers. Their own self-respect as human beings, even objective truth itself, no longer matters to them, so they voluntarily allow the party to destroy them.
Some historians have disputed Koestler’s depiction. The confessing defendants at the Moscow purge trials were indeed tortured, they said. But Koestler, who had narrowly escaped both communism and fascism as a young man, had plenty of personal experience with totalitarian systems, so his interpretation is hardly fantasy; in any case, he was not writing history, but rather a psychological portrait of the hard-core party man who alienates himself from all values other than subservience to the party.
Shorn of its tragedy and reduced to something more like farce, Darkness at Noon becomes an instruction manual for understanding the psychology of the toadying functionaries who infest the Trump administration. Now-former chief of staff Reince Priebus, recent victim of the White House’s periodic purges, is a museum grade example of Rubashov’s Syndrome.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/08/why-do-republicans-have-so-little-dignity/
People wonder why and how Hitler was able to gain so much power in Germany?
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